[aspensmonster]

Well that's the kicker isn't it? These drugs do alter who the user is, to an extent. But presumably, the user wasn't entirely happy with how they were doing beforehand. Trying to wade throw a mess of external variables that are impacting your psyche while remaining simultaneously open to the possibility that the problem is within is a special level of hell that those dealing with depression are all too familiar with. There is of course a certain allure to the throes of depression. Nothing does a better job of forcing you up against the limits of your own existence and consciousness, and down into the rabbit hole, than when you start to realize that you're using your brain to analyze your brain to determine if your brain is the problem, all under the explicit assumption that your brain might well already be a problem that you couldn't possibly detect and really it's all just hopeless because how can you use a broken tool to analyze or fix itself and it's all a nonlinear chaotic system that you're at once in control of and trapped by... You get the picture. Sure, such mental exercises are fertile ground for creativity, but they're also fertile ground for slowly losing grip on the tattered remnants of what might be called sanity.

So you look to antidepressants. That's still you trying to fix you. And perhaps the changes it induces to the psyche don't outweigh the benefits of depression, even in the face of its monumental drawbacks that urged you into trying the pills in the first place. Now, I can hardly say I've been on everything that can be prescribed. It's exaggerating to say that I even dabbled in SSRIs. But for the few months I spent on them, I wouldn't say they made me into somebody I wasn't. I'd say that I made me into something different. Of course, I might not have liked that different somebody. I might have pondered whether this was all still in my head and I was swallowing sugar pills and what would that say about me if the mere suggestion that I was taking magic pills made me better but wouldn't that put me back at square one... And so on.

But I can't in good conscience begrudge anyone trying to muddle their way through life. If pills work for them then by all means take them. If they're happier with that different someone then I'd say they've embraced their new identity, not morphed into something they aren't.

I don't really know why I typed all this up. I'm tempted to Ctrl-A/Backspace it. But hey, when's the next time the ramblings of the inner conscience will be topical in HN?

[mumbi]

If you must take the pill to become the new you, is it really you you're becoming? I feel that it's the pill, not your self, that becomes the identity.

I suppose we could take this further, for the sake of making a point, and ask if one receives a lobotomy, is one his or her self?

I'm glad you typed it up, it made me think.